The Season of Burning Trucks

Stories of GPS directions run amok are a dime a dozen these days: gullible travelers led astray by their iPhones or dashboard navigation systems, driving for hours into the desert night, straight into mountain lakes, up unpaved rural roads that are clearly no more than footpaths, or even halfway across Iceland before they realize something’s wrong.

But there is still something remarkable and almost Raymond Carver-esque about this story of a small town in Arkansas being visited—over and over again—by runaway trucks, their drivers misled by GPS, their vehicles mechanically unprepared for the town’s sharp curves and steep terrain. “Several of them go through here with their brakes smoking or on fire,” a local resident tells ArkansasOnline.

This vision of a town—population a mere 100—now seeing the blazing and violent side-effects of digital navigation technology is both hilarious and beautifully symbolic of the larger phenomenon, of people becoming over-reliant upon algorithmic systems and finding their journeys no longer proceeding as planned.

Like freak weather caused by atmospheric events halfway across the country—bringing unexpected local snow or unseasonably heavy rain hundreds of miles away—intangible changes in route-mapping software send burning trucks roaring through a remote mountain town.

It is both a macabre spectacle and a symptom of bigger technological shifts—before, of course, those same algorithms receive slights tweaks and all those trucks, as mysteriously as they first arrived one night, halo’d in oily flames, now cease to appear.

Imagine being five or six years old in a town like that, not knowing what GPS is, looking out from the darkness of your bedroom over several weeks of late nights, and living through this season of burning trucks, those infernal visitors from further up the mountainside, tumbling down past houses, trailed by smoke, their fiery wheels reflecting bright red in the windows of parked cars. It’s like the visions of Ezekiel, updated for an age of car accidents and Google Maps.

Where are they coming from? And why? Then it all stops and the mystery deepens.